Comfort Food

In a few hours, Flips Flipping Pages will be discussing books around the theme of Filipino food.

I’ve been looking forward to this book discussion, because I think among the Flippers’ core group  we’ve already proven our foodie status ages ago! A lot of the memorable foodie experiences I’ve had in recent time are with my Flipper friends: a weekend spent snacking in Tagaytay; Mike’s hummus; our British tea party; devilishly delish dinner at Wicked Kitchen; lunch at Casa Rap; Japanese buffet at Islandhopper’s farm; the humongous Al’s Rice; a French baker’s bread, and breakfast at Yogurt House in Sagada; and French dinner buffet at Log Cabin, also in Sagada. Practically every single monthly book discussion — or just about any time we’re all together — turns into a food trip.

For this discussion, I chose to read Anvil Publishing’s Comfort Food, edited by Erlinda Enriquez Panilio, which, incidentally, also happens to be book #100 of 2009! Comfort Food is a compilation of essays by notable Filipino writers and society figures. I actually got this back in 2006 for P40 from the Anvil bargain bin at the Manila International Book Fair, and I got as far as around two essays but I was only able to finish it for the book discussion.
In the aperitif by Fe Maria C. Arriola, she proposes:

“Comfort food, it seems, is all about feelings. Comfort food is wht you crave when you are looking to be whole, healed, or loved… Comfort food is more like a good soak in the bathtub — you have nothing to show for it afterwards except a good feeling about yourself, a more positive state of mind… It is a means by which to love yourself, from which you experience a soupy, cared-for feeling. It gives you the sense of well-being you feel upon coming home  after being away a while. It is hugging yourself inside when a storm is raging outside.”

I like this definition of comfort food because it’s a healthy concept, as opposed to, say, eating to fill a void, or eating in decadence.

The book is very Filipino, involving a lot of Filipino dishes that made my mouth water just reading about them , and I love that about the book. A lot of people say Filipino food isn’t suited for the international palate (not to mention a lot of dishes don’t look very appetizing with all the browns and greens) but I think the book proves that this quality is exactly what makes Filipino food special. The essays are written by Filipinos both in and outside the country, half-Filipinos, and even foreign nationals, and all of them find something in Filipino cuisine that they can’t find anywhere else, and this is what makes them come home. I like that because I always want to have something to come home to, a gastronomic experience that is unique to my being Filipino.

I liked all the entries in this anthology, which includes essays by Edith L. Tiempo, Marra PL. Lanot, Bambi Harper, Carla Pacis, Tingting Cojuangco, Sonia Roco, Jaime Laya, Krip Yuson, Peque Gallaga, Gene Gonzalez, and many more, but my favorite is Butch Dalisay’s “Mami Dearest” featuring mami or noodle soup.

I’m also a fan of noodle soup, and I think Butch Dalisay hits the concept of comfort food right on the head in this essay, and I was thoroughly impressed by his extensive noodle repertoire, from instant noodles to ramen to Chinese mami, from canned noodle soup to misua (egg noodles) and sotanghon and macaroni to dry noodles.

I loved his closing paragraphs, which really sums up his noodle love:

“My niece Eia calls me ‘Mr. Noodles,’ staring in wonder as I polish off a tubful of chicken mami and as I smack my lips in unadulterated pleasure. She’s looking at one big happy man who’s every bit a boy with a stray noodle peeping out of a corner of his mouth.

I guess that’s where the true comfort lies in comfort food: the assurance of the permanence of certain states and sensations — not only in the gut, but in the heart and in the mind.”

I loved this book so much that it’s inspired me to create my own comfort food essay, which you’ll find below.

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My copy: trade paperback, newsprint edition
My rating: 5/5 stars

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Growing up Ilonggo in Makati

I grew up surrounded by food.

I never really thought anything about it, but my strongest childhood memories are of food. Not that we were well-off — far from it, in fact — but despite the constant worry over household expenses, my mom always had food on our table. When it came to food, my mom could stretch out peso bills until the figureheads squeaked.

Mama is a great cook, and every other person will say their mom is a great cook, but when people taste my Mama’s cooking, they never get over it. This talent of hers saw our family through many tough times, whether it was to supplement Papa’s income while he was working overseas, to support the family when my dad got back from Saudi and couldn’t find a job for a while, and to raise all four of us single-handedly when Papa passed away from cancer in 1996.

Now my parents were both Ilonggos hailing from Isabela, Negros Occidental but they started the family in Manila,  so my two older sisters Tattie and Bambi, my younger brother Yani (he prefers Enzo now) and I  were raised in an Ilonggo household. While we never got the hang of speaking in Ilonggo, my siblings and I understand it perfectly, as our parents often addressed us in a curious mix of Ilonggo  and Tagalog (and in straight, rapid-fire Ilonggo when they were  really mad!) and we replied in Tagalog.

Mama and Papa were proud of being Ilonggo and could not stand “Tagalog” food so classic Filipino dishes that were served at home always had a touch of Ilonggo in them — our monggo (mung bean stew) is thick rather than soupy; our adobo was stewed, and then fried; we dipped our green mangoes in ginamos (bagoong, or shrimp paste) flown in by relatives from Bacolod and Iloilo; rice was cooked with a knot of tanglad (lemon grass) embedded in the grains; batuan/ batwan fruit, also flown in from the province, was the preferred souring medium over the Tagalog sampaloc (the sourness of batuan blends better with other flavors, and not jarring  like sampaloc, in my opinion); and like all Ilonggos, we never used patis (fish sauce) as a condiment.

And while we didn’t exactly speak it, we learned to taste food in Ilonggo terms: a yummy dish was namit! and a total doozy was la-it (with matching tongue in throat gestures). Sweet was tam-is, spicy was kahang, while sour salty and bitter were the same in Tagalog – asim, alat kag (and) pait. Ask for more food than you can finish, and you’d be called lapad-mata (in Tagalog that’s takaw tingin) and when you were too chicken to try out an exotic food you’d be called manol, which has no direct translation but it’s guaranteed to make you everyone tease you mercilessly.

We snacked on Ilonggo delicacies, which puzzled our young non-Ilonggo friends — crispy barquillos, paper thin wafers rolled into slender tubes; piaya, flat flaky pastry with sweet paste in between; crunchy golden biscocho, toasted bread with a topping of condensed milk; pinasugbo, toasted banana chips covered in caramelized suger and stuck onto paper cones; and a variety of sticky rice treats like ibus and linid-gid.

And on Sunday lunch and special occasions, the house would be filled with the aroma of Ilonggo specialties: chicken binacol, a variation of tinola, with slivers of tender young coconut flesh; batuan, and a knot of tanglad; pancit molo, wanton dumplings in garlicky chicken broth; laswa, a mix of vegetables  like squash, malunggay, sitaw, okra and whatever else is available stewed in their juices; pochero, which is the Tagalog cocido, a tomato-based stew with beef, plantains, lettuce, kidney beans, and sweet potato wedges; and the dish I consider my comfort food: KBL, a.k.a. kadios, baboy, kag langka (pigeon peas, pork and jackfruit), a unique  dish served in all Ilonggo households.

I’ve been eating KBL as a child and I’ve never really had a particular hankering for it until I was out of college — there’s something about this stew that just warms me up, and even the mere thought of the dish makes me almost taste it. Because fresh langka is hard to come by here, not to mention our supply of batuan and kadios comes from the province, my mom cooks it only whenever all three ingredients are available, which isn’t very often, making me look forward to KBL even more.

I usually sleep in til noon on Sundays, but the scent of KBL cooking  wafting  into the room is enough to wake me up and make me sigh in anticipation of bliss. Or when I’m out of the house and I know there’s a pot of KBL waiting for me at home, I usually forgo the company of friends just so I can go home and have a bowl. And when my mom was in the US for six months, I would sneak off, alone, to the nearest Ilonggo Grill, just to get that KBL fix.

I douse my rice in KBL, and the first spoonful has me singing, then eating in appreciative silence  until I polish off the plate.  KBL is meaty with a subtle sourness (the batuan), infused in the chunks of langka (jackfruit, unripe) and cubed pork, punctuated with starchy bites of kadios (pigeon peas), but now I realize it’s not just that. It has that warm and earthy flavor of home, of an ethnicity that I have always been conscious of, and a cultural identity that I have been raised in. It’s my being Ilonggo in a bowl, and that’s what makes every bowl stand out in the conglomeration of tastes and flavor profiles that are stored in my memory.

I’ve been meaning to get my mom to teach me how to cook this dish, but we’ve never gotten around to that cooking session yet and as I live in fear that someday I won’t be able to get that KBL fix, I’m determined to learn to cook it exactly like my mom makes it. It’s a legacy that I want to pass on to my future kids, as my parents have passed it on to me — growing up Ilonggo in the big city.